Social research strategies -- Research designs -- Planning a research project and formulating research questions -- Getting started: reviewing the literature -- Ethics and politics in social research -- The nature of quantitative research -- Sampling -- Structured interviewing -- Self-completion questionnaires -- Asking questions -- Structured observation -- Content analysis -- Secondary analysis and official statistics -- Quantitative data analysis -- Using SPSS for windows -- The nature of qualitative research -- Ethnography and participant observation -- Interviewing in qualitative research -- Focus groups -- Language in qualitative research -- Documents as sources of data -- Qualitative data analysis -- Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis: using NVivo -- Breaking down the quantitative/qualitative divide -- Mixed methods research: combining quantitative and qualitative research -- E-research: using the internet as object and method of data collection -- Writing up social research.